Arts & Culture

What Do You Want To Know About The Sochi Olympics?

NPR

Original article posted on .

What are people excited about seeing at the Winter Games, which start this week? How do figure skaters spin without getting dizzy? What kind of place is Sochi? Those are some of the questions we're seeing on Quora, the question-and-answer site that calls itself "your best source of knowledge."

The site has set up a Sochi Olympics Hub that we'll be checking out during the Winter Games. We hope to bring you the most interesting questions that pop up. And feel free to comment here — or on the Quora site — with your own questions and answers.

Here are some of the questions we're seeing so far, as the Sochi games' first events get under way Thursday, along with answers:

"It takes figure skaters a lot of practice, but after awhile they get used it and don't even notice it anymore.

"When first learning how to spin, they focus on something in the area and try to catch a glimpse of it with every rotation. For me, it was the large digital clock on the hockey scoreboard. However, if they take a break from skating, it takes a day or two to get used to the dizziness again.

"Rotating on one foot in figure skating is unlike rotating in say, ballet. If you notice in ballet, they sort of jerk their heads back to the same spot with every rotation. That is not the case with figure skating, where the rotations are much faster and up to 30 times or more in one spin combination."

"It's all in the take-off of the jump, they all land the same. An axel takes off from a front edge, the lutz always takes off a long back edge. The other 2 are a little tricky to notice. Here is a video that explains the difference between the jumps:

"It's the largest resort city in Russia. This makes sense because there is just a small strip of seaside Russian territory on the Black Sea, which is the only body of water that is warm enough to have a resort. It has generally been known in Russian culture as a vacation spot, like maybe Key West or Vegas in the United States.

"Why it is used as a site for the Winter games when there are many other winter-like destinations in Russia is a different question — does not make too much sense to me, but maybe just to promote foreign tourism in the area."

Arts & Culture / July 29, 2015

The money, awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, will fund efforts to digitize historical state newspapers and publish the works of philosopher George Santayana. A study of African Americans' fight for Civil Rights will also be funded by the grants, among others.